An information communication technology called cloud computing is becoming popular. The cloud computing is one aspect of the application of the information communication technologies for developing services in the cloud environment in which a variety of resources such as many computers and peripheral devices are deployed on the network.
Devices for establishing the cloud environment such as databases and servers are integrated, maintained and administered in a datacenter. In the datacenter, each device is put under operation and maintenance control by use of message monitoring. Namely, when a failure occurs in a device to be maintained, a message notifying that the failure is detected is reported from the device to an operation administrator's computer.
When the operation administrator receives the report, the operation administrator checks the content of the message. And then, the operation administrator sends a customer engineer according to the content of the failure. The customer engineer carries out a field survey and the like to determine how to deal with the device in which the failure occurs. And, the customer engineer repairs the device or replaces the device and the like.
Here, when a failure occurs in a device, related devices and related applications which are affected by the failure may report messages notifying failures. Thus, when one failure occurs, a plurality of messages are reported from a plurality of devices and the like. In addition, the messages are intermittently reported from the same devices and the like until the customer engineer handles the failure. Therefore, for example, many unnecessary reports are generated when the operation administrator judges the necessity of sending a customer engineer. Then, for example, the operation administrator sorts notification messages into groups. Namely, the operation administrator's computer deals with a plurality of messages which are reported together in relation to one failure. This kind of process is called filtering.
With filtering the messages, the operation administrator may for example check one grouped message in relation to one failure and performs administrative tasks including determination of whether or not a customer engineer is sent. Thus message filtering may reduce the operation administrator's burden.